The present invention relates to extrusion dies in general, and more particularly to extrusion dies which are to be mounted across the path in which a farinaceous material, such as dough or pasta, is confined to travel during its expulsion in a predetermined direction from a kitchen appliance, especially from a pasta-making appliance for household use.
A kitchen appliance of the aforementioned type is disclosed, for instance, in the copending U.S. application Ser. No. 184,351 assigned to the same assignee as this application. However, this is not the only construction in which the extrusion die according to the present invention may find a useful application; thus, the exact construction of the kitchen appliance is of no consequence for the present invention.
Kitchen appliances, mainly for industrial or institutional use, have been known for many decades, as evidenced, for instance, by U.S. Pat. Nos. 762,128; 1,138,101; and 1,159,489 all of which disclose an extrusion die for producing macaroni, which includes a plate-shaped main member having a plurality of perforations, and a plurality of pin-shaped inserts individually received in the perforations and supported therein on fins integral therewith. Such constructions may be acceptable for use in an industrial environment where the machine is operated more or less continuously for at least one work shift so that it need not be cleaned after each use thereof for extruding a charge of the farinaceous material, that is, pasta or dough material. However, if it were attepted to employ this concept in smaller appliances, particularly in those to be used in households, such kitchen appliances would have only limited, if any, consumer appeal, particularly in view of the cumbersome and laborious assembling operation as well as disassembling operation which would have to be performed after each use of the kitchen appliance since otherwise the clearances between the individual pins and the surfaces bounding the perforations could not be cleaned of pasta or dough remnants so as to obtain sanitary conditions. This is one possible reason why pasta-making kitchen appliances for household use have not found widespread recognition even now when food processors of different constructions and types are in high demand.